The first obstacle to making a company truly Customer Centric is to be found in the company’s own functional structure. Traditional companies are organised into departments responsible for a specific function, such as sales, marketing, finance, operations, legal, systems and human resources.
Each of these departments has a very partial view of the customer and, exaggerating a little, we could say the following:
- For the sales department, the customer is someone to be sold to and on whom the achievement of our sales targets and our sales bonus depend.
- For the marketing department, the customer is the one to be impressed, to convey our brand image and to amaze with our advertising campaigns.
- For the finance department, the customer is a source of revenue and costs that needs to be optimised.
- For the operations department, the customer is someone who causes the company to incur costs that need to be kept under control, making it operate in the most efficient channels and not complicate the operation.
- For the legal department, the customer is a potential plaintiff who must be protected by means of sophisticated contracts that give the company a strong position in the event of a potential legal claim.
- For the IT department, the customer is a user of its website and mobile applications.
- For the HR department, rather than the customer, the reality is that HR departments tend to be more oriented towards their employee, whom they see as their internal customer.
The problem with the customer being so many things at once is that sometimes departments collide with each other and cause the company to behave in a contradictory way towards a customer, driving the customer completely crazy.
We see it in some banks, whose operations departments chase customers out of branches by referring them to virtual channels, only to have their branch sales force call them to come and buy from their branches. We also see it in insurers, who carefully design advertising campaigns to excite their customers and then send them policy renewal letters written by lawyers that customers are unable to understand. We also see it in some telecommunications companies who, while they have a customer without service due to an unresolved incident, call them to try to “upgrade” their fibre connection.
It seems clear that this kind of situation is incompatible with an outstanding customer experience and is unbecoming of a Customer Centric company.
What can we do to have a shared customer vision?
Here are some ideas that could help us to ensure that all areas of the company have a shared vision of the customer.
1) Use of a corporate Customer Experience methodology by all departments.
Customer Experience tools such as archetypes, Customer Journey or Voice of Customer methodologies are not tools to be used exclusively by Customer Experience and Marketing departments.
If, for example, a legal department is drafting the terms of a new policy, it will necessarily have to test with clients and make sure that it writes in language that is both legally effective and understandable to the client. If the finance department is embarking on a cost optimisation process, it will somehow have to measure the impact these cuts have on the customer experience. Otherwise, what we save in operating costs we will lose in claims costs or even incur losses because many customers stop buying from us.
The corporate Customer Experience department has a particularly relevant role to play here since, far from being the department in charge of designing all the company’s Customer Journeys, it has to become a facilitator that provides all areas of the company with methodological tools and promotes the creation of a Customer Centric corporate culture.
2) Project work in disciplinary teams.
No major change in the company that has an impact on the customer can be undertaken by one department alone. Working within the functional structure of the company means that the company is divided into silos, communicated only at management level. This means that any decision that impacts more than one department is slowed down or simply cannot be operationalised.
If we want to maintain a shared customer vision and work in an agile way, it is important to create cross-functional teams made up of professionals from different departments, who have a common goal and who are empowered to make decisions without the need to continually raise queries to their hierarchical superiors.
3) Objectives shared by the whole organisation.
As long as each department in the company has its own objectives, it will not be possible to maintain a Customer Centric vision. If, for example, the company’s legal director is measured by the number of lawsuits lost and not by the Customer Experience when reading a contract, his or her priority will not be that contracts are understood. And if the purchasing department is measured only by the savings made in negotiating with suppliers, they cannot be expected to make Customer Experience a priority. Therefore, all departments, not just those that deal directly with the customer, should have Customer Experience objectives.
Moreover, if the objectives of each department are misaligned, it is likely that each department will try to pass on its costs to the next department. Why would I spend time explaining the product in a telephone sales channel? Customers will already go to the shops to have their questions answered.
To avoid this, some companies such as Amazon charge customer service costs to the department that originated the call. So, if a customer calls Amazon’s contact centre because they did not understand the invoice, the cost of that call is charged to the billing department, which will then make the necessary arrangements to make the invoices understandable and not charge them any more costs.
4) Unique customer information accessible in real time.
Recently, an insurer who had just cancelled my car insurance for excess claims called me to try to sell me some investment funds.
The truth is that it seems incredible that with the technological means currently available to us, a company would devote the effort of its salespeople to call a potential customer with such a low propensity to buy.
There are CRM solutions such as Salesforce that provide a single customer file, accessible by all departments in real time and which integrates both sales and customer service information. In this way, the company can generate automatisms that avoid launching a commercial campaign to a customer who has an open incident.
For a company to be truly Customer Centric, all areas of the company must be able to access all customer information in real time.
Having a shared customer vision is the first step in making our company Customer Centric, however, we will also need to align the organisational structure, create a corporate culture and equip the organisation with the tools and methodologies to deliver an extraordinary Customer Experience.
And in your company, what are you doing to generate a shared customer vision?